GREEN WOODPECKER. 189 



In a specimen of the Nutcracker now before me, I find the bill 

 very slender at the point, the upper mandible projecting, like a bit 

 of thin horn, over the under one. Authors whom I have consulted 

 seem to agree in saying that the bill is obtuse at the point. Can 

 there be two species, or is the difference merely sexual?* Either 

 bill I should think a very unfit instrument for cracking nuts. 



INSESSORES. PICIDJ1. 



SCANSORES. 



THE GKEEN WOODPECKER 



PIOUS VIRIDIS. 

 Lasair choille. 



ALTHOUGH this woodpecker is a well-known inhabitant of English 

 woods, it is very rarely seen north of the Solway or the Tweed. 

 I have never seen a recently killed specimen, nor can any of 

 my correspondents inform me with certainty of its having been 

 observed of late years in any of the counties of Scotland. Mr 

 Forrest, gunmaker, Jedburgh, showed me a specimen a few months 

 ago which had been shot near that town about the year 1848; and 

 Mr Angus has sent me word that one was killed near Aberdeen, 

 and that on another occasion in 1868 Mr Hunter of Tillery had seen 

 a single bird in the woods near his residence in the same county. 

 Mr Harvie Brown informs me that there is a Sutherlandshire 

 specimen of this bird in the private museum at Dunrobin Castle. 



The green woodpecker is inserted as a Scottish species by 

 Pennant in his Caledonian Zoology, published in 1777, and 

 twenty years later it was included in the old statistical account of 

 Scotland by the minister of Dunkeld in his description of that 



* Since writing the above, I have learned on consulting Mr Stevenson's 

 highly interesting volume on the " Birds of Norfolk," that a paper on the 

 subject of the supposed specific difference between the Nutcrackers of Central 

 Europe and those of Scandinavia, was read before the Royal Academy of 

 Sciences at Brussels by M. Edm. De Selys-Longchamps, and has since been 

 published, with illustrations, in the Bulletin of the Academy, torn, xi., No. 10. 

 In this paper it is affirmed that the species found in Central Europe has a sharp- 

 pointed bill, while the Scandinavian Nutcracker has that feature shorter and 

 stouter, " from which peculiarity the specific term of brachyrhyncus had been 

 previously applied to them, in contradistinction to the thin-billed examples 

 (caryocatactes}" P. 282. 



